LAUNCESTON'S COUNCIL SHIFTS THE GOAL POSTS AND IT COSTS AND HURTS RATEPAYERS

 

Following Council's meeting the question still hanging in the air is:

•  Has Launceston City Council been in collusion with the JAC Group in respect of the drafting of this Specific Area Plan and can you assure the community that no inducements of any kind have been received by elected representatives, or Council staff, to facilitate this planning amendment; …ratepayers and the community are very concerned and cynical in regard to this whole process? ... Read the full text here

Boiled right down to the essentials:

•  The JAC Group submitted a Development Application to the City of Launceston to build a high rise hotel and it was approved despite there being an aggrieved property owner and a network of ratepayers challenging the application.

•  The approval was challenged and approval was overruled by the planning tribunal.

•  Launceston's council regrouped and has accepted an application from the developer to change the city's planning provisions in order to accommodates the JAC Group's plans and aspirations and on the evidence at considerable expense to ratepayers 

•  An aggrieved property owner funded her appeal to the planning tribunal via a substantial loan and her appeal was upheld. The aggrieved property owner won her case!

•  The the aggrieved developer seemingly appealed to the council to 'move the goal posts' and the evidence points to the council jumping as high as the developer wanted it seems they would and the outcome slipped through its May 20 without a glitch. Now the aggrieved property owner loses her case and her money and seemingly the developer wins!

•  The now 'developer friendly' councillors take umbrage at the suggestion that they might have been induced to use ratepayer's money to satisfy the aspirations of a developer. Furthermore, they feign incredulity at the proposition that council make the aggrieved property owner an ex gratia payment to compensate her for her losses after winning her appeal and it having it potentially nullified.

There is that age old observation that goes ..."if it looks like a duck, and quakes like a duck and it craps all over the place just like a duck, its a good bet that it is in fact a duck". This is the kind of bush wisdom that colours peoples perceptions of what they are seeing and hearing here.

it's obvious that before the meeting the councillors got together to get all their ducks lined up or granted leave to stay away. 

For the Mayor to step down from his podium when things get a bit testy in order to protest his and councillor' innocence only compounds the perception that something is not quite right. 

Then again, that Shakespearian phrase that goes "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" somehow resonates in the chamber and beyond replete with all its innuendo as the Mayor sort of invites anyone to take a look at his bank account.

Now there is an offer that cannot really be delivered upon.

Apparently, another councillor fired off an email threatening all sorts things that boiled down to its essentials was exemplar of bullying if true. The whiff of 'whatever' nonetheless lingers.

In other jurisdictions all this would be probably be more than enough to spark some kind of integrity inquiry, but not in Tasmania. In other jurisdictions councils have been sacked for what such inquiries have turned up. In Queensland local government legislation has been changed when this kind of contention started to look and quake like a duck.

The proposal needs to come back to Council as a development application but when it does the way seems pretty clear for approval. Yet as time moves on this class of development becomes less and less relevant given the imposts they place on urban places. They become less and less sustainable in world where the imperatives climate change become increasingly evident.

However this crop of councillors and planners may well be in even greener pastures or in their graves or sitting in their rocking chairs taking with them their spoils of incumbency. Like a snail we all leave a trail, it is that silver track that says where we have been and where we went and inevitably there is a smell.

Somehow this story smells like it is not going to fade quickly.

The QVMAG in Review

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Queen Victoria  Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG) is in decline. Plainly, the reasons for it being so are to do with multiple factors but mostly to do with the paucity of governance.

Increasingly, and over a decade plus,  the institution's status as a council cost centre has stifled its ability to change given council's administrative hierarchy. Unlike, regional museums and art galleries elsewhere in Australia the institution is not governed at arm's length from its funding bodies – here the City of Launceston.

Launceston's ratepayers invest annually in the institution and for the most part willingly. The bitter pill is that the institution each year delivers less and less. It's output has reached a point where it is unable to deliver services commensurate with the long and short term investments in it and the community's 21st Century expectations.

The review here delves into the issues impacting upon the institution's performance and offers some options for a way forward for the institution's governance, management and funding. 

On it's current administrative trajectory the QVMAG runs a real risk that it may well need to close and and have its collections dispersed. 

Arguably, the institution has arrived at point where its future is unclear unless there is real change of the kind that brings it into the 21st Century at the time of its 130th Anniversary.

HOME PAGE ... https://qvmag2021.blogspot.com/

CONTEXT ... https://qvmag2021.blogspot.com/p/review-context.html

GOVERNACE ... https://qvmag2021.blogspot.com/p/governance-options.html